The global business landscape has been marked by the widespread adoption of cloud services. According to Precedence Research, this tendency will stay strong: the cloud computing market is predicted to hit $2.3T by 2032. As more enterprises migrate to the cloud and start prioritizing portability, new approaches emerge to meet the rising demand. Cloud agnostic architectures, in particular, have been steadily gaining traction, supplementing native development. Considering both cloud native and cloud agnostic have their specific uses, how can you decide which model fits your business better? Let’s explore the main differences between cloud native vs cloud agnostic architectures to find the best fit.
What is cloud native?
Before we dive deeper into comparisons, let’s look at a quick overview of both approaches. Cloud native is a model of cloud development that emphasizes the use of microservices architecture and containerization, enabling engineers to build and deploy highly scalable solutions. It also leverages specific cloud platforms, making full use of their services and capabilities, thus enabling businesses to enhance their agility and adaptability to fluctuating market demands.
There are several significant benefits that cloud native offers. This approach promotes rapid deployment and continuous integration, reducing time to market (TTM). Faster TTM, in turn, allows you to deliver solutions to customers before your competitors, capturing more revenue. In addition, cloud native solutions are associated with high resilience and scalability, enabling enterprises to meet rising demands seamlessly.
What is cloud agnostic?
Cloud agnostic architectures enable engineers to create apps that run smoothly across any cloud platform. Unlike the native approach, a cloud agnostic strategy allows businesses to deploy and manage apps across multiple cloud environments with minimal—if any—changes. Essentially, such apps can leverage open-source and vendor-provided toolkits, and they’re portable enough to migrate both between different public clouds and from on-premises infrastructures to the cloud.
In fact, facilitating seamless cloud migration is one of the main benefits of cloud agnostic systems. With its help, organizations can move workloads and applications between different cloud platforms as needed, responding swiftly to changes in business or technology requirements. Additionally, opting for cloud agnostic practices helps avoid vendor lock-in, optimize costs, and improve performance. For instance, when N-iX started developing a cloud agnostic data platform for a large industrial supply company, helping the organization reduce overhead was one of the main goals.
Read the full case here: Scalable big data analytics platform for leading industrial supply company
Cloud native vs cloud agnostic: Key characteristics and differences
When choosing between cloud agnostic vs cloud native, businesses need to consider their resources and long-term goals to determine which approach aligns with their strategy. Overall, cloud agnostic focuses on portability, while cloud native strives to reach the best optimization for a particular cloud platform. Both architectures have their pros and cons, so let’s discuss how they compare in several key aspects.
1. Cost
Cloud native development often comes with lower initial costs in terms of upfront and long-term investments. However, expenses begin to climb later, especially if you need to migrate to a different provider. Cloud agnostic development is on the other side of this spectrum: while it may require a significant upfront investment, the expenses associated with portability are negligible.
2. Flexibility and portability
The benefit of greater portability is among the top deciding factors when enterprises compare cloud native vs cloud agnostic development. Moving an application to a different vendor is easier to manage when it is cloud agnostic. Also, this model enables engineers to utilize a wide range of integrations, libraries, and open-source tools.
When it comes to cloud native apps, switching cloud providers can become quite an endeavor. On the one hand, this approach streamlines development by granting engineers useful built-in tools for networking, monitoring, and scaling. At the same time, it limits the solution’s portability and puts it at risk of vendor lock-in.
If portability is your priority, consider partnering with a company that has proven expertise in cloud migration and development. For example, our cloud experts at N-iX specialize in cloud to cloud and on-premises to cloud migration, helping businesses transfer their infrastructures to various clouds and develop with flexibility in mind.
3. Access to the latest innovations
So far, we’ve discussed that cloud native development supplies a lot of standard built-in functionality, but it also provides a shortcut to the latest innovations. It allows you to adopt technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and serverless computing faster and in the form that suits a specific cloud ecosystem. On the other hand, the cloud agnostic approach limits access to new features, as providers often release their latest proprietary developments specifically for their cloud platforms.
4. Time to market
Cloud agnostic and cloud native apps possess different starting kits of capabilities, and it affects their TTM. Natively developed apps come with ready-to-use infrastructural elements and pre-built templates, so getting them off the ground is a streamlined process. Agnostic apps, on the other hand, may have a longer TTM due to their complexity.
5. Security and compliance
Maintaining strong security can be challenging in any system. So, is it easier to handle in cloud native vs cloud agnostic infrastructures?
Agnostic architectures grant you the opportunity to stay entirely in control of what security measures you implement across all environments. At the same time, this approach obliges you to gather a team with a deep understanding of cloud security and regulatory compliance.
Cloud native development reduces this burden. If you employ this approach, your cloud vendor will provide the majority of security components, and your team will gain access to all the necessary security tools.
Still, even in cloud native development, cybersecurity and adherence to applicable regulations are tricky, particularly for businesses in fintech, healthcare, and other areas that handle sensitive information. Should you choose to delegate this task, N-iX offers a suite of all-encompassing cybersecurity services, including the integration of robust security mechanisms suitable for your infrastructure, vulnerability management, penetration testing, support with certifications audits, and round-the-clock monitoring and incident detection.
Read more: Cloud security assessment: 9 steps to security resilience
6. The scale of the project
Consider the scale and complexity of your projects. For large-scale solutions that demand high resilience and availability, a cloud native approach might be more beneficial. At the same time, opting for the cloud agnostic approach may result in greater flexibility when it comes to more compact projects or those with varied workflows.
7. Current infrastructure capabilities
Assess the infrastructure you already have in place and the technology stack you operate. If you already have a significant investment in a specific cloud platform, going for cloud native development can help you maximize its value. However, if you’re confident that shifting to other platforms will be necessary at some point, cloud agnostic strategies can provide greater adaptability.
8. Scalability
In terms of scalability, cloud native apps are marginally superior to cloud agnostic. With native development, you can rely on built-in scalability features of your cloud environment and orchestration tools like Kubernetes. This helps manage resources efficiently and easily scale cloud native apps up or down based on demand.
Agnostic apps, on the other hand, are designed primarily with interoperability in mind, and scaling them can be a more complex process. One of the challenges is achieving consistent performance across different cloud providers, which may call for additional management. Another obstacle that can result in diminished performance is the limited access to a cloud platform’s scaling toolkit—as sound as the benefits of standardization are, this is one of its pitfalls.
9. Management
Similarly to the previous point, general management is easier to conduct with all the native resources, tools, and cloud environment coordination that the cloud native approach offers. With agnostic architectures, you need to design and gather a toolkit for cross-environment operations yourself, as well as develop specific governance policies and workflows.
Regardless of the approach you choose, managing and maintaining a cloud environment is a multifaceted process. If you’re looking to optimize it, outsourcing development to a reliable cloud consultant will provide you with all the cloud management services you need. For instance, at N-iX, we continue providing our support after development, implementing continuous monitoring, cost control, orchestration, and change management to ensure your infrastructure runs like clockwork.
10. Resilience
Cloud native apps often implement microservices architecture to boost resilience by isolating the impact each failed component could have on the system. They also leverage load balancing, auto-scaling, distributed data storage, and other specific ready-to-go features provided by their cloud vendor, while cloud agnostic solutions require additional effort to implement the same mechanisms.
At the same time, cloud agnostic applications provide redundancy through a multi-cloud strategy. If a vendor experiences an outage, the solution can still operate, provided the organization’s workloads are distributed across multiple cloud providers.
11. Required expertise
Cloud native vs cloud agnostic approaches have different but equally high requirements in terms of the needed expertise. Cloud agnostic development may seem more challenging because it demands a broader understanding of general cloud principles and interoperability tools, along with proficiency in the integration of open-source features.
Cloud native development, however, is just as comprehensive. Since this approach is built upon leveraging the capabilities of a particular cloud provider, it requires a deeper understanding of specific cloud platforms and their unique services.
If you’re still deciding on the right approach, a cloud consulting company with experience in both would be a great partner. Here at N-iX, we offer cloud development and migration services for agnostic and native projects alike, supported by our expertise in AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.
Read more: Managed Cloud service providers: Tips on choosing the tech partner
It’s also worth noting that, in some cases, you can reap the benefits of both approaches instead of making an either-or decision. Cloud agnostic and cloud native solutions often augment each other in hybrid or multi-cloud environments—in the end, it’s a matter of ensuring the chosen strategy supports your enterprise’s evolving objectives. If you’re evaluating the pros and cons of cloud native vs cloud agnostic models, partnering up with an experienced cloud development company can present the shortest path to finding the right solution.
How can N-iX help you choose between cloud native and cloud agnostic?
N-iX is a trusted cloud consultant with 21 years of experience in providing cloud native and cloud agnostic development services. With a team of over 400 cloud experts, we are prepared to become a reliable partner, helping you choose and implement an effective cloud strategy tailored to your business needs, as well as providing cloud migration services, infrastructure maintenance, and application security. Our company is compliant with rigorous data security standards, including ISO 9001, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and GDPR, to ensure your cloud security is robust and responsive in the current landscape. Being an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, a Google Cloud Platform Partner, and a Microsoft Solutions Partner, we can also help you select the most suitable vendor for your objectives.
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